Daniel Flynn was making serene progress towards a maiden Test century as NewZealand reached 180 for three at tea on day one of the first Test against the West Indies in Dunedin.

Debutant opener Tim McIntosh certainly found out why it takes a lot of character to make the step up to Test match cricket. After 45 minutes and 38 deliveries he was still to score his first run in Test cricket. The West Indies bowled with admirable control with Daren Powell claiming the first wicket of the match while McIntosh continued to survive his torture by fast bowler.

Despite displaying a huge amount of patience, he eventually chased a wide one and was lucky to see the ball fly through the fingers of gully to the boundary for four.

After Jamie How was caught by Shivnarine Chanderpaul off of Powell, McIntosh and Flynn put on 87 runs for the second wicket, surviving until after lunch when McIntosh was caught by Lionel Baker off of Chris Gayle for 34.

His innings lasted 110 deliveries and he eventually found his feet to hit five fours.

West Indies struck again soon afterwards to remove the dangerous Ross Taylor for 15 when he was caught by Xavier Marshall for Gayle's second wicket.

However, they could do little about Flynn, who cruised past his previous Test-best score of 49 on his way to a maiden half-century as he relished his promotion to number three in the batting order, reaching tea on 92 not out from 183 balls with 12 fours.

Jesse Ryder was alongside him on 22 from 47 deliveries.

Australian-born Brendan Nash became the first white player to play for the West Indies in Tests for over 35 years. Baker also makes his debut for the tourists.

NewZealand all-rounder Jacob Oram failed a late fitness test and was replaced by Kyle Mills.

Monday, December 8, 2008

India is leading the series by 3-0 against England. In 3 match played today at Green Park stadium Kanpur India was declared winner by 16 runs under duckworth luis system as bad light forced the game to close few overs earlier.

Harbhajan Singh who was declared man of tha match for his 3 for 31 in 10 overs became the sixth Indian to claim 200 wickets in one day matches. Harbhajan Singh is in the elite group of Indian bowlers other five are: Anil Kumble (337 from 271 matches), Javgal Srinath (315 from 229), Ajit Agarkar (288 from 191), Kapil Dev (253 from 225) and Zaheer Khan (214 from 152).

The feisty off-spinner had also become the third Indian -- behind Anil Kumble (619 from 132 Tests) and Kapil Dev (434 from 131 Tests) -- and 22nd cricketer in the world to claim 300 wickets in Test cricket during the final Test of the four-match series against Australia in Nagpur this month.

Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Federal Sports Minister Pir Aftab Shah Jilani said on Monday that Pakistan will welcome India if they opted to come here for a much-awaited cricket series scheduled for January-February 2009.

Jilani told reporters that Pakistan will show "sportsman spirit" by hosting India in a friendly environment and urged the Indian government to clear the eagerly-awaited tour of India"s cricketers.

"We don"t believe in mixing sports and politics," said Jilani, a senior leader of the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). "There may be tensions between the governments but sports shouldn"t suffer. The cricket series (against India) should go on and I want assure India that if decided to send its team to Pakistan, we will host it in a befitting manner," he added.

India are scheduled to tour Pakistan from January 4 to play three Tests, five One-day Internationals and a Twenty20 International. But the series is in doubt because of the strained relations between Pakistan and India in the wake of the Mumbai killings.

Media reports coming from India suggest that the Indian government has decided against clearing its cricket team"s visit to Pakistan.

Indian cricket board (BCCI), however, has rejected such reports saying that a final decision on the fate of the Pakistan tour is yet to be taken by the government. Jilani, who took over as Sports Minister last month, is planning to begin a campaign to lift Pakistan sports.

He will be meeting the country"s sports legends in the coming days in a bid to devise a comprehensive strategy to boost national sports. Jilani said that he will also be meeting top officials of the Pakistan Olympic Association (POA) and other sports bodies to find out the reasons behind Pakistan"s embarrassing slump at the international arena

Monday, December 1, 2008

Pledges support to BCCI and ECB, hopes England Test tour can proceed if safety and security allows; Will ask Full Member Chief Executives how best to come together to address safety and security issues; “Cricket binds all ICC Members; we must ensure those ties remain strong”

ICC Chief Executive Haroon Lorgat today offered condolences to the people of Mumbai and those caught up in the terror attacks on the city, on behalf of world cricket’s governing body.

And Mr Lorgat pledged to provide whatever assistance might be required by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI).

“On behalf of the ICC I would like to offer the condolences and sympathy of the entire cricket world to Mumbai and to India in the wake of the terrible events of the last few days,” he said.

“We can be grateful that members of the cricketing fraternity who were in Mumbai when the terrorists struck have all been accounted for but what has happened goes beyond individuals. Many innocent lives have been lost and it has shocked the whole world.

“Sadly, terrorism appears increasingly to be a fact of life that we must endure. What we as a cricket family must do is to try, wherever possible, to rise above it and show that those who wish to perpetrate evil cannot win.

“If safety and security allow then I would urge the England Test tour of India to go ahead and if it does so then representatives of the ICC will be there to show solidarity with the competing teams.

“And if those Tests are played I would also urge supporters of the game to attend them as that will be the best way to send a message to those who seek to disrupt our way of life, that we will not be prevented from doing what we want or what we enjoy.

“I have today written to the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) pledging whatever support the ICC can offer to help ensure that, if appropriate, cricket goes ahead.

“I have also written to the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) with a similar offer of support and solidarity.

“The Chief Executives of the ICC’s 10 Full Members, as well as three Associate Member representatives, the ICC President, Vice President and I will be meeting in Cape Town next week in a scheduled Chief Executives’ Committee (CEC) meeting.

“At that meeting I intend to raise the question of how we can all come together to address the challenges that the issue of safety and security brings to our game.

“Cricket is a common thread that binds all ICC Members and we must seek to ensure those ties endure. By doing so we will ensure our strong sport will grow even stronger,” added Mr Lorgat.

Monday, June 2, 2008

After great pomp & show, the 44 day fiesta came to an end which was quite fabulous with the last ball end. The final saw a neck to neck contest between both the participating teams but the whole IPL saw a tremendous flow of money.

It is still very confusing that IPL stands for what? Cricket after IPL stands for what? Is it still a sport in the true sense or a business with the sport being superficial or mere window dressing? The very interesting thing is with the loosing team the franchise also is at loss but it recovers rather earn a surplus through other areas related to the game & of course the official betting is there to add up to the already hefty pockets.

Thursday, May 29, 2008

India Cricket NewsThe sports world in the modern day scenario is not merely based on the sports itself; it is equally based on the broadcastings & information dissemination as the globalised village formation needs to share each & every happenings going around.All this is just not to share the information or create awareness but also to popularise the event with which the information is dealing.The matter to be discussed here deals with cricket more specifically. Even when only a dozen of countries were involved with it, its popularity was competing with soccer’s.This has happened due to the availability of cricket news all across the globe from ‘n’ number of media forms. Now if go deeper in this, we will find that even in cricket Asian cricket has challenged the popularity of Ashes (or the founder teams of cricket).

Let’s talk about particularly Indian cricket in Asia as it has been the country ahead from all the aspects. Now the most interesting thing to be noticed here is the growth of Cricket in India with the media & IT sector of the country. These aspects have grown hand in hand, thus yielding the great popularity of Indian Cricket leading to the popularity of Asian Cricket. Also this has contributed to the world cricket.One more issue which crops up is the revenue growth of the BCCI; we will discuss it in the next article.The development of It & It-enabled services in India flooded the internet world with websites on Cricket, giving us all the India cricket news with the world news of course. The most crucial factor has been the cricket latest news scorecard to generate the traffic towards the websites from the television media. This happened due to the development of communication industry (mobile phones supporting GPRS, etc.) & the very handy notebooks (laptops) with easily available data cards.So, the cricket fans should thank the internet media developers for bringing in the cricket news with cricket latest news scorecard & the service providers should take care of the developments in the consumer demands on an on going basis.